CVE-2026-44496: Axios: Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) via Cookie Name Injection

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 5.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2026-06-11 · updated 2026-09-11
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

Axios is a promise based HTTP client for the browser and Node.js. Axios versions before 0.32.0 on the 0.x line and before 1.16.0 on the 1.x line build a regular expression from the configured XSRF cookie name without escaping regex metacharacters. In standard browser environments, an attacker who can influence the cookie name passed to axios can cause expensive regex backtracking while axios reads document.cookie. The practical impact is client-side availability degradation, such as freezing the affected browser tab while axios prepares a request. The issue does not affect ordinary Node.js HTTP adapter usage, React Native, or web workers, where axios does not read document.cookie. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.32.0 and 1.16.0.

Affected products

axios: before 0.32.0; from 1.0.0 before 1.16.0 — fixed in 0.32.0, 1.16.0
Npm Axios: from 1.0.0 before 1.16.0; before 0.32.0 — fixed in 1.16.0, 0.32.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: axios 0.32.0, 1.16.0; Npm Axios 1.16.0, 0.32.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2026-44496 or the next vulnerability affects your stack